George Will, in a recent column, called January "this godforsaken month" or words to that effect. I don't know. I've always rather liked January. There was one January when I was in junior high school, living in Spokane, Washington, that was like something out of the fevered world of that wacky kid in Conrad Aiken's short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." Only I got it for real. Eastern Washington state had a real Minnesota-style winter that year. We were buried in snow from Christmas until April.
I liked it. We got snow days out of school. My room was cozy and warm. It got old after a while, but on the whole I remember that January with fondness.
On the other side of the coin, I'm from the San Diego area, and January is usually a delightful month there. Cool, as in not hot (maybe in the 60s) and generally sunny. A nice month to go bike riding out along the Silver Strand to Coronado.
I live in Washington, D.C. now, but we haven't had much snow this winter. In fact we've had damn little. I do NOT put that forth to support global warming conspiracies; it's just a fact. D.C. runs hot and cold when it comes to snow. I was here for the Blizzard of '93 and the Blizzard of '96, so I know. This year it's just been lighter, that's all. I'm not really looking at snow as I write this, but a dry street. The snow photo above is a stock picture I pulled off the Internet.
A Saturday afternoon in January in Washington. WETA radio is quietly offering The Barber of Seville and there's fresh coffee in the kitchen. Time to ponder some big issues at random.
Here's one, one of the more shameful confessions a baby-boomer can make. I've never particularly cared for Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
I was 11 years old when it was released. My older sister was a big Beatles fan, as were most 13 year-old girls in 1967, and she bought it right away. Hence, as of last year I've been listening to it off and on for 40 years. My sister's vinyl copy wore out years ago. I have the CD, but I seldom play it.
It's just not my favorite Beatles album. There's something sort of, I don't know, overstuffed about it. Over-produced, I guess you'd say. And if you're my age and you remember the Paul-Is-Dead thing that swept across the world a few months before the Beatles self-destructed, you'll also remember that many of the so-called "clues" relating to Paul's demise came from that album and its jacket, which for me anyway somewhat tainted the album with a dark tarbrush. But chiefly I guess it's a matter of taste. I liked to think of the Beatles as a band, and Sgt. Pepper was not produced by a band. It was produced by a bunch of guys who spent five months dial-twiddling and tape-cutting and experimenting in a studio somewhere. I don't have anything against that, and I'm glad they were able to do it, but I just don't care all that much for the result. There's little spontaneity in it, none of the kick, sock and passion I associate with rock n' roll. It's a produced piece of art, which makes it neither fish nor fowl. Among those early "concept" albums of the late '60s, I much preferred the Who's Tommy, which sounded more like what I thought rock music should sound like.
I'm not alone in this feeling. Ringo Starr once said he felt the same way. He may have changed his mind by now; the radio interview in which I heard him say that Sgt. Pepper was not his "fave" took place in 1977. I was just out of college and was walking a security-guard beat at three O'clock in the morning at a lemon packing plant in Ventura, CA. I had my radio on for company, and there I sat, perched on a dormant forklift, listening to Ringo hold forth. He told the interviewer that he didn't especially care for the album, and when he expressed a marked preference for Abbey Road, the Fab Four's last effort, he said the reason was because with Abbey Road, "We went back to being a band." Well, they didn't go back to being a band for very long, but that was significant.
Okay, on to other topics.
One thing I like about the January cold is that it makes it easier to clean up my back yard. My wife Valerie and I have three dogs. And I can tell you that when dog waste is frozen, it's much more pleasant, or perhaps I should say less unpleasant, to clean up than when it's being kept nice and soft by temperate rain.
Okay, this next question is directed only at my fellow conservatives: are you getting as sick and tired as I am of left-wingers calling virtually anyone they don't like a "racist?" It's become the equivalent of "poo-poo head" on the playground. This got my goat the other day when I saw what some lefty blogger had written to the American Spectator On-line in response to an article someone had posted about why they admired Ronald Reagan. "You like Reagan because you're a racist and an elitist," the lefty blogger sniffed. Well, that's a new one on me in two ways. First of all, it's usually conservatives who call liberals "elitists," not the other way around, and secondly, Ronald Reagan was probably the most UN-"racist" president we ever had. But lefties don't like Reagan, so when someone expresses admiration for him, they resort to their rhetorical old reliable: "Poo-poo h - I mean, RACIST!!"
Why do we let them get away with it? Well, sometimes we don't. Two or three years back Al Franken, that toxic little twit who I wish would choke to death on his Che Guevara T-shirt, called somebody he didn't like a "racist" without providing any support for the claim -- I suppose Franken assumed he didn't have to back up the taunt; among lefties "racist" has become shorthand for "I don't like you." I forget who the insulted party was, but he retaliated by posting a photo of Franken on the Internet and putting the word "RACIST" underneath it. Touche and well done.
I'm a fan of chess in the same way that I'm a fan of surfing. I'm not very good at it and don't expect that I ever will be, but I like the game. So I took close notice of Bobby Fischer's death this month. His epic clash with Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky in 1972 was one of the highlights of that summer in the news media, right up there with Mark Spitz winning I-forget-how-many Olympic gold medals for swimming, then proving a not-very bankable hero when he turned out to have too little acting ability even for Wheaties commercials. But I remember some slick magazine proclaiming that Fischer and Spitz had made us "proud to be Americans" again that summer. Yes, Fischer was a genius. Recently, just to get a sample of how he played, I cranked my computer chess program up to its highest level, which happens to be called "Fischer," and tried playing "him." He surprised me with an attack focused around advancing his king and queen's pawns, respectively, launching a pawn-based attack on the center of the board. I've always accepted the conventional wisdom that you deploy your knights right away and castle as soon as possible. I didn't even get a chance to castle; "Fischer" checkmated me in about six moves.
But the rest of the story has to be told -- he was also a whack job from Planet Schizo. Much has been written about the close relationship between chess genius and insanity, so I won't go into that, but Bobby Fischer could not deal with the world outside the stratospheric, hermetically-sealed world of this board game. Music, mathematics and chess are generally acknowledged as the three disciplines in which it's possible to show genius at a tender age, because all three of them center around mastering abstract disciplines that are beyond the realm of personal experience -- they're concerned only with measures, technique, counting and spatial relationships. If Bobby Fischer had a counterpart in music, I might say it was Glenn Gould, similarly precocious in his talent and similarly filled with strange tics and quirks -- it's been speculated that Gould might have suffered a mild form of autism. But Gould, for all his peculiarities, was articulate, well-read and well-spoken, and expressed himself beautifully, if sometimes a bit archly, in prose. Fischer was a hopeless mess at communication. I once saw him on The Dick Cavett Show. I was only 16, but I was nonetheless amazed at how thoroughly stupid he managed to sound. Despite being a Jew himself on his mother's side, he ended up as a paranoid wing-nut who believed Jews are secretly controlling all the world's governments and applauded the 9/11 attacks. It doesn't surprise me. He never finished school ("School is for dumb bunnies. I don't need school to play chess," he said in his youth) and it showed. The greatest chess player of all time had a breadth of ignorance that was truly breathtaking. Genius he was unmistakeably, but as my mother once said of Gould, "Not the sort of person I'd want to have breakfast with."
I was on the phone a few Sundays ago with my old pal Doug Parker who lives in Reno, NV. Doug and I rode some hard trails together back when we were a couple of scrabbling radio guys (Doug was a deejay; I did news) sharing an apartment in Vacaville, CA. Doug is an all-around sports nut, which I'm not, but we both love baseball and of course we love to talk about it. He was telling me of how he related to a female acquaintance recently what he feels are the four most beautiful words in the English language: "Pitchers and catchers report."
Yes, sir! Only three weeks until spring training! As I said in this space just about a year ago, we baseball fans get the best of winter. For us, spring starts in February when "Pitchers and catchers report."
You know, it looks like it might be about to start snowing. Catch you later.
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